Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed

Design and analysis of a Speed-Aware Routing Protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

The flexibility of movement for the wireless ad hoc devices, referred to as node mobility, introduces challenges such as dynamic topological changes, increased frequency of route disconnections and high packet loss rate in Mobile Ad hoc Wireless Network (MANET) routing. This research proposes a novel on-demand routing protocol, Speed-Aware Routing Protocol (SARP) to mitigate the effects of high node mobility by reducing the frequency of route disconnections in a MANET. SARP identifies a highly mobile node which forms an unstable link by predicting the link expiration time (LET) for a transmitter and receiver pair. When the nodes have high relative velocity, the LET calculated is a small value; this means that the link is predicted to disconnect before the successful transmission of a specific demand. SARP omits such a packet-sending node from the link route during the route discovery phase. The omission of such unstable links helps SARP limit the flooding of control packets during route maintenance and reduces the overall control overhead generated in on-demand routing protocols. NS2 was used to implement the SARP with ad hoc on-demand vector (AODV) as the underlying routing algorithm. Extensive simulations were then conducted using Random Waypoint Mobility model to analyze the performance of SARP. The results from these simulations demonstrated that SARP reduced the overall control traffic of the underlying protocol AODV significantly in situations of high mobility and dense networks; in addition, it showed only a marginal difference as compared to AODV, in all aspects of quality-of-service (QOS) in situations of low mobility and sparse networks --Abstract, page iii

Routing and mobility strategies for mobile ad hoc networks

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Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of-the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: quality-of-service and video communication, routing protocol and cross-layer design. A few interesting problems about security and delay-tolerant networks are also discussed. This book is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks